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Hugh Pickens writes writes "The La Times reports that AOL has agreed to purchase the Huffington Post for $315 million. The purchase will increase AOL's news portfolio as it competes against Yahoo's growing online news publication profile and Google's news efforts, as well as traditional media companies online. The purchase has yet to acquire government approvals, but the boards of directors of each company and shareholders of the Huffington Post have approved the transaction."

I don't know. Huffington Post and DailyKos were the two big attempts of the left wing to create their own "viral" websites. The end result's been a lot of hate speech, a whole lot of banned commentariat, and very little if anything accomplished.

Huffington Post's biggest claim to fame in recent years has been as a haven for the anti-vaccination lunacy of retards like Jenny McCarthy, Dana Ullman, and followers of Andrew Wakefield.

Huffington Post's biggest claim to fame in recent years has been as a haven for the anti-vaccination lunacy of retards like Jenny McCarthy, Dana Ullman, and followers of Andrew Wakefield.

The HP might be fine for political commentary but it is a haven for quacks, woos and snakeoil salesmen peddling all kinds of pseudo scientific new age nonsense. It is as anti-science and anti-reality. Not surprisingly many liberals, especially scientists and academics are as ashamed by what the HP promotes as conservatives are of creationist drool that infects their blogs.

I don't know. Huffington Post and DailyKos were the two big attempts of the left wing to create their own "viral" websites. The end result's been a lot of hate speech, a whole lot of banned commentariat, and very little if anything accomplished.

I'd say that turning a $1 million investment into a $315 million buyout is one hell of an accomplishment.

You're getting modded down, obviously by supporters of those sites. However, it's true--DailyKos was infamous for its "screw them" post regarding dead soldiers in Iraq, and since the campaign consultant scandal, Kos posts so little that the site has become a place for user "diaries." Basically, it's just user-submitted articles now that only serve to pat liberals on the back for being liberals.

Huffington Post was Ariana Huffington's attempt to create a left-wing version of the Drudge Report, right down to t

I had almost listed Little Green Footballs as yet another site that operates more on cult of personality (which is ironic given that Mad King Charles has all the personal magnetism of day-old jello left in the trash), and a perfect example of how such cultishness is not unique to one side of the aisle or the other, as evidenced by the way he went from the right-wing deep end to the left-wing deep end in such a perfect performance of blackwhite [wikipedia.org] (complete wit

Finding news that really does not have a 'spin' on it is hard. Fox is right up there with spin. However, you can not sit there with a straight face and say Huffington is any better. Fox is just more blatant about it. It is the subtle ones you need to watch out for. They do that by fact stacking and putting opinions after the facts or running them together. Another way is to put the facts that make something look bad at the top of an article and the ones that they dont like so much near the end (as many people only read the first few paragraphs and they know it).

People say 'reality has a liberal bias'. What big pile of steaming... (see how I put an opinion in the middle here) The stories will have whatever spin the editor of the story puts on it even if they do not realize they are doing it. 'Blogs' are even worse as they are usually by people who are interested in the story. So they put their own take on it.

What it comes down to it though, is facts based news does not sell as well. As it is rather dull and boring. "If it bleeds it leads".

People also like paying for self affirmation. "see I was right and those xyzs were total loon jobs". So while you may not like Fox news there are many out there that like hearing that sort of news. Just as there are many out there who like watching CNN/MSNBC.

Filter out the opinions on stories (many many many have them). You will see much of the 'news' is just opinion fluffer. The op'ed pieces are easy to filter. It is the ones where they bury it in the story... Do not let others tell you what your opinion is. Make up your own mind with the thing holding your ears apart. That is why I do not watch the newsertainment stations.

Agreed, blatant spin is easier to deal with, bullshit filter gets triggered early. News sources that pretend to be "fair and balanced" (to steal the Fox line) but are really spun to buggery are the hard ones to deal with. I prefer to get my news from multiple sources and make up my own mind.

Finding news that really does not have a 'spin' on it is hard. Fox is right up there with spin. However, you can not sit there with a straight face and say Huffington is any better. Fox is just more blatant about it....

This is nothing new. Throughout history, the news "industry" has been run by people with an interest in the news and a strong motive to persuade their readers rather than informing them. Any well-informed person has always tried to hunt down different versions of news stories, with different biases. The pretense that the internet has introduced a new problem here is just that, a pretense. It's just more blatantly obvious, because it's so much easier now to find reports with different biases. It can st

Any well-informed person has always tried to hunt down different versions of news stories, with different biases.[citation needed]

People tend to say that but all of the people I know who might claim to be 'well informed' are really seem to live in a echo chamber. The yellow journalism of years past have morphed past the control of media moguls and now constitute something different. So much of the media is built upon FUD that it's hard to escape it, no matter where you look for news.

Everyone knows there is only bias on one side.
The side you do not like.

This is why, in the sciences, there is such a strong emphasis on not accepting results (especially unusual results) until they have been replicated by different observers (with different funding.-). It's well understood that discovering your own biases and blind spots can be extremely difficult, so researchers expect that their discoveries will be double- and triple-checked by others with different biases and blind spots.

The publishing industry has a different sort of example: It's well understood tha

Well thank god we have the bastions of intelligence and civility over at Fox News, Free Republic and Conservapedia to help usher in a new dawn of meaningful political discourse, right?

There's no such thing as 'meaningful political discourse', politics in its entirety is just apes throwing turds at each other.

The difference is that you won't see those sites being sold to AOL any time soon. The left just can't build a viable online community because they're always fighting over who gets to be Supreme Leader of the Glorious People's Website.

Until their base of "confused old people who pay $20 a month to hear 'You've Got Mail' whenever their bloated AOL client connects over the (cheaper, faster) DSL they are actually using..." dies off, AOL should be able to operate with a certain degree of freedom.

Longterm, their prospects are rather grim(which is presumably why they are buying up non-doomed properties while the cash holds out); but anybody who hasn't switched away from an AOL subscription by now(either to DSL for incrementally less money a

I think AOL knows the writing is on the wall for their service. It costs a lot of money to run and their user base is literally dying off. It must be an expensive pain in the ass to maintain that client, and run all those dialups and field support calls, and an infrastructure of mail servers, and put content into the thick client to justify its existence. At some point the user base will drop below a point that it is economical to do and they'll kill the service in phases.
I think AOL are smart to diversif

Of course, Time Warner spun off AOL last year, so they won't be killing Time Warner at all.

As for the rest of it, AOL actually made a (small) profit last year, unlike pretty much every year since 2005 or before.

AOL still makes money off of Granny, but that's no longer their business model. They're a content and advertising company now, and one of the biggest, if not THE biggest internet advertising business around courtesy of advertising.com.

AOL was *NEVER* a great service. When I had a 1200 baud modem, AOL was a joke. When I was first discovering usenet, AOL was unknown, but a few years later became a bad joke. (And arguably led to the eventual death of usenet.) When a tech preview of Mosaic rendered our Gopher site better than Gopher itself, AOL was a joke and a ghetto.

Nice idea, but I don't pay anything for my cellphone ($0.00 per month + per-call billing). So yes I would have to pay an extra several hundred extra, if I switched my travel laptop over from dialup to cellular internet.

I don't know how you figure. Dialup is 53k while 3G is 200k (or so I've heard). It's only four times difference. ----- Also my dialup squashes the images to almost no space, so it's actually faster (pages load as fast as my 1000k DSL).

It only recently turned a profit, IIRC. I'm not sure how you can value a project that only recently got into the black, at $315m. Maybe it's the HuffPo's advertising gross, although if it was that high I would've expected it to go into profit long ago. Maybe it's their anticipated ad gross based on projections into the near future. Maybe the intangable value of a zeitgeisty outlet is factored in somewhere.

I'm so confused by AOL. They have ads all over Silicon Valley asking you to go work for them "before your boss does", but I have no idea what they're selling or working on. And why would anyone with a hint of critical thinking would want to work for them?

Correct me if I am wrong but on the news this morning they said that most of the content of the Huffington Post came from unpaid bloggers, usually with a liberal outlook. It seems to me that they might not be as happy working for nothing for AOL as they were with an independent outlet. What are the chances that a good number of them will move elsewhere?

One of the supposed big appeals of HuffPost is its talkback system, but I can't stand it. Slashdot's talkback system may be a huge resource hog, but it's the only one I've seen that can handle large threads in a way that's useful. If nothing else, Huff should emulate Slashdot's ability to take you back to your posting to see any responses. All HP has is the ability to page through hundreds of pages of stuff in an LIFO order, so you post just keeps getting buried deeper and deeper.

It used to be that people heralded the internet as a death knell to the media conglomerates like ClearChannel and News Corps. Now we're seeing just how simple it is for even a dying internet presence to gobble up prominent venues for discussion, whether of technology (Engadget, TechCrunch) or politics (HuffPo). There's no reason to break out the tin foil hat just yet, but it's surprising how a left-leaning blog such as Huffington Post is not immune to a major league buyout. I'm sure many fans of the blog wi

It used to be that people heralded the internet as a death knell to the media conglomerates like ClearChannel and News Corps. Now we're seeing just how simple it is for even a dying internet presence to gobble up prominent venues for discussion, whether of technology (Engadget, TechCrunch) or politics (HuffPo). There's no reason to break out the tin foil hat just yet, but it's surprising how a left-leaning blog such as Huffington Post is not immune to a major league buyout. I'm sure many fans of the blog will defend this acquisition as a huge increase in journalistic capability, and claim that the authors will remain as interested in maintaining an independent politic voice, but only time will tell.

The thing is, people are mobile on the web. Network execs hated the invention of the remote control because they counted on people being too lazy to get up off the couch and change the channel. The last thing they wanted was the ability for people to change channels as quickly as the impulse hit them.

And as far as the web goes, the content producers are just as mobile. If the Huff name dies, everyone can make the jump to a new site, easy-peasy.

As for her selling the site, I suppose there's absolutely nothing illegal about it though it does seem to go against the basic assumptions someone would make about why she put it together in the first place. The assumption would be that it's intended to be a megaphone for getting progressive values into the public sphere, gaining suitable publicity, and any money-making activity there should be limited to the non-profit, self-perpetuating kind. But if none of that was spelled out in a charter and bylaws then there's nothing illegal about it even if it is terribly disappointing. Might be an impetus to put together something with those expressed interests instead.

The thing that surprises me is AOL of all companies. I thought they were in their death throes.

As for her selling the site, I suppose there's absolutely nothing illegal about it though it does seem to go against the basic assumptions someone would make about why she put it together in the first place. The assumption would be that it's intended to be a megaphone for getting progressive values into the public sphere, gaining suitable publicity, and any money-making activity there should be limited to the non-profit, self-perpetuating kind.

I suppose there's absolutely nothing illegal about it though it does seem to go against the basic assumptions someone would make about why she put it together in the first place. The assumption would be that it's intended to be a megaphone for getting progressive values into the public sphere, gaining suitable publicity, and any money-making activity there should be limited to the non-profit, self-perpetuating kind.

Yeah, but the the anti-vaxx, alt-med and new-agey crap spewed all over the site, and there r

The assumption would be that it's intended to be a megaphone for getting progressive values into the public sphere, gaining suitable publicity, and any money-making activity there should be limited to the non-profit, self-perpetuating kind.

I heard it recently and I had to look it up just now: She was actually a republican in the 80's and 90's. Not only that, but she wrote a handful of articles for the National Review and was married to a republican congressman. I personally have no doubts that since that

The internet has certainly disrupted many media models and the purchase of virtual online assets by less virtual companies is part of this. Newscorp is putting huge investment into an iPad app because the other physical assets are going to performing less well over time. The Fox news channel will lose viewers quickly as the death camps kill the old people that make up most of it viewers. The purchase of the WSJ was only a stopgap as the journalism has been declining for years and now it is mostly just dr

As for her selling the site, I suppose there's absolutely nothing illegal about it though it does seem to go against the basic assumptions someone would make about why she put it together in the first place. The assumption would be that it's intended to be a megaphone for getting progressive values into the public sphere, gaining suitable publicity, and any money-making activity there should be limited to the non-profit, self-perpetuating kind.

People are so naive. The first basic assumption anybody should make is that people are in it for the money unless presented with strong evidence to the contrary. I'm sure it wasn't even declared as a non-profit.

For the Huffington Post, this was no doubt a ridiculously good offer. $300m cash for a web site, which has fairly good traffic but a limited amount of really unique content; they'd be idiots not to sell. The owners / investors make out very well, and future value becomes AOL's problem. Even (liberal, conservative) bloggers can do math well enough to know when it's time to sell out!

On the other hand, I'm surprised that the activist investors of the world haven't been trying to force AOL to turn this cash

There is no reason to look outside of the history of AOL for something like that. When Time Warner split off AOL everybody talked about "Why did Time Warner buy AOL in the first place?" when in fact AOL had bought Time Warner and then kept Time Warner as the overall corporate name.

Yet in the end, didn't Pixar's CEO became Disney's largest shareholder.
Though I don't really think the whole thing was more of an executive-recruiting play, where the shareholders were trying to get someone competent on their board that they could trust.

Ok, let me see if I've got this straight. You make two points: one to complain about corporate media consolidation, and the other to complain about the regulations that were once an effective barrier to media consolidation, before they were gutted by people who love them some corporate media.

I've been reading HuffPo for a number of years and there is one thing that they do that is just so tacky, the "rate this picture."

There are always topics like "The 10 best cities to raise a kid" and then pictures of each city and then everyone votes on which picture is best. What is the point of that? About 50% of the time they'll put up a picture of a different city than that indicated.

This has been my experience with Huff - the last time I had the patience to wait for the front page to load, I was struck by the resemblance to USA Today. Just as tabloid, just as buzzword, just as bland - buckling under one of the most over-loaded information "designs" I've seen since the 90s.

That the site design seems contrived to make the "good stuff" hard to find., that the visual clutter is a significant majority of any loaded page, that you can get a "liberal opinion" elsewhere with a bit of effort a

The Huffington Post is news? I always thought of it as a mega-blog of commentary. Perhaps there belays a shift in our cultural thinking as traditional journalism dies and commentary from biases become the norm and thus the only thing we can call "news."

Raw news is valueless today. There's little advantage to being the first to break it when the other outlets can be echoing your story in minutes. It's as fungible as water. Commentary is brandable, and unique, and protectable though. That's where the value is.

Commentary is also subjective, though. And can be fraught with mistakes or omissions purposefully to express a point of view. Then again, even pure journalism can't tell the whole story, only give different perspectives. In the end, I'd rather have several perspectives from say witnesses than commentary from an author if I want the news. That's not to say that I wouldn't find the commentary valuable but I would want the story first.

I hate to break it to you, but the shift towards "biased commentary" started with Walter Kronkite, if not earlier. Once the network execs figured out that viewers were trusting his face, voice, and delivery and were by and large fact-agnostic, that was basically the end of it.

Twenty to thirty years ago you could still get actual news out of the newspaper or television. These days you gotta dig long and hard, intentionally and carefully, for the few nuggets lost in the slurry of spin, opinion, and the almi

Not sure we've ever gotten actual news from the media outlets. By 'actual news' I am referring to the unbiased and accurate reporting of an event.

But who chooses which events will be reported? Events are happening all the time, all over the place. Remember that earthquake in Haiti? Things down there haven't gotten any better, but now no one cares nearly as much. Simply choosing what to report, and then doing it unbiased and accurately, is, in and of itself, biased. A reporter wants that people know some information. Wants for what? "Because it's newsworthy" assumes the point in dispute and is journo-bullshit.

By which, of course, you mean the editorial staff's strong political leanings and the web site's lefty culture? If that actually becomes more balanced, people who go there for their news aggregation will just go somewhere else. This is just the web site's founder doing what she planned all along, and finally racking up a big chunk of cash after setting out bait for an audience that swears they hate it when anyone makes a big bunch of cash. The irony is pretty great, though.

Actually, HuffPo is relevant, at least to a bunch of hipster douchebags who get all their news on their Mac via some Portland coffee shop's free wi-fi. You know, the kind who will absolutely stand behind a $1/3-billion display of capitalism if it's done by anybody else, right?